Even the most rebellious poets follow more rules than they might like to admit. A good poet understands grammatical norms and when to break them. Some poems rhyme in a pattern, some irregularly and some not at all. Poetry’s subtler rules seem hard to program, but without some basic norms about what a poem is,…
Attending the re-enactment of the Battle of Busy Run was a favorite and familiar part of our homeschool curriculum. The end to battle reenactments at Bushy Run Battlefield has left many members of the community saddened and frustrated. But in Harrisburg, officials with the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission consider the new “no force-on-force” policy…
“I have always understood the Nazis,” Golding confessed, “because I am of that sort by nature.” And it was “partly out of that sad self-knowledge” that he wrote Lord of the Flies. Rutger Bregmen writes: “began to wonder: had anyone ever studied what real children would do if they found themselves alone on a deserted island?…
I knew it! Busted!! “One night someone made a joke about just taking all these ideas, lumping them together, and saying the Greeks had done it all 2,000 years ago,” Haddlebury said. “One thing led to another, and before you know it, we’re coming up with everything from the golden ratio to the Iliad.” “That was…
“Professing Criticism” proceeds on the basis that, in order to decipher the present and to prepare for the future, one must first turn to the past. “The study of literature—in the premodern sense of any writing that has been preserved or valued—is very old, the oldest kind of organized study in Western history, excepting only…
“To begin our hoax scenario, we intended to build participants’ trust in the machine by pretending that it could decode their preferences and attitudes,” the study authors wrote. “The system included a sham MRI scanner and an EEG system, that supposedly used neural decoding driven by artificial intelligence (AI).” […] In other words, participants were…
I was born in 1968 and grew up with reruns of TOS. I can only remember seeing a handful of episodes for the first time (and those are some of my earliest memories). Some of the episodes are awful, and the third season is overall very weak. You can be a Trek fan without loving…
This was probably the wealthiest, most powerful group I had ever encountered. Yet here they were, asking a Marxist media theorist for advice on where and how to configure their doomsday bunkers. That’s when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their…
Rewatching ST:DS9 The episode starts with O’Brien on the floor, as Bashir exposits that he was exposed to plot contrivance particles. On his way to meet a Romulan delegation, Sisko passes rowdy, drunken Klingons whose ship is in for repairs. O’Brien, trying to relax, talks Quark into setting up a dart board. He’s about to…
Not only is this a fantastic story about language and culture and colonialism, it’s also a great example of how a talented PR writer used journalistic storytelling strategies to turn a scholarly study into an appealing narrative. We start with a very specific, very personal story about a man returning home for his father’s funeral.…
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the first talkie The Jazz Singer, the songs “Ol Man River” from Showboat and “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” and the novels To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf) and The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Thornton Wilder) and the first Hardy Boys novel will (finally) enter the common domain in 2023. I chose my…
I’m about 1/4 through teaching an online American Lit course. Some students are commenting on the use of “men” to mean “people,” as if it’s brand new to them. Others helpfully explained to their peers that in an era when only men could vote or hold office, it would have been in some cases historically…
Leapin’ lizards, the clip from the cabinet scene (where I played FDR) has 42k views on YouTube. Loved this set by Mark Kissner!
During moments of crisis, I’ve certainly noticed that feeling of paralysis and the desire to look around for anyone who seems to know what they’re doing. Creating the idea of a crisis in the minds of the public (they’re making it illegal to say “Merry Christmas,” they’re weaponizing pronouns to groom your children, those silly…
Rewatching ST:DS9 Quark is enjoying an ear massage from a humanoid woman who is clearly more interested in a business deal when they are interrupted by the arrival of Grand Nagus Zek. In the B story, Bashir is nominated for a prestigious Federation medical award, yet he seems aggressively unenthusiastic. (Some good character bits, and…
I recorded this oral interpretation of a delightful Christmas story.
Video game history is colliding: Sierra founders are bringing a seminal text adventure game to VR (The Verge) Colossal Cave Adventure (Crowther 1976; Crowther and Woods 1977) (photo credit) Photo of Ken and Roberta Williams; Wikipedia photo of Adventure on a CRT Sierra On-Line (Sierra Entertainment, Inc.); King’s Quest, Space Quest, Phantasmagoria; original publisher of…